Enjoy the burgers, BBQ, and beer, but don’t forget what it’s all about..

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Senator Robert Byrd, the longest serving-member of Congress, died this morning at the age of 92. Widely known as a master of Senate rules and procedure, and nicknamed the ‘King of Pork’ (a title he relished), Byrd had served in Congress since 1953 and in the Senate since 1959. To put this in perspective:

When Byrd entered Congress in 1953, a postage stamp cost 3 cents and American kids were clamoring for a new toy called Mr. Potato Head. Dwight Eisenhower was president, Winston Churchill was Britain’s prime minister and Josef Stalin was still the Soviet Union’s leader.

Like a lot of politicians, Byrd probably overstayed his welcome a bit. In his later years, he was very frail. Even so, you have to give the guy credit. He loved the Senate and devoted his life to public service. Politics aside, we should all extend our thoughts and prayers to his family.

Everyone knows that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computers back in 1976. But did you know there was a third founder?

If Ron Wayne, now 76, weren’t one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn’t have turned out like this.

He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool’s Day, 1976: Co-founder — along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — of the Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company’s original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company’s partnership agreement.

That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne did not hold onto the stock, instead selling it back for $800 less than two weeks later. Poor guy could have been a billionaire.

It reminds be a little of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who together in the 1930s created Superman. They later sold the rights to DC Comics for $130 (though they were later awarded an annual stipend and were acknowledged as creators).

On this day in 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, setting off the Korean War, which would eventually involve all the great powers of the day: the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union, making it a major Cold War battleground. Before a ceasefire was reached in 1953, nearly 4 million Korean civilians on both sides were killed or wounded (just over 5% of the population of the Korean peninsula), in addition to almost 137,000 South Korean soldiers and almost 37,000 U.S. soldiers killed. Remembered in the U.S. as the “Forgotten War,” the Korean War was one of the most brutal wars in the world history.

Since the 1953 armistice was signed, South Korea has gone from an impoverished backwater to one of the world’s leading economic powers, with a standard of living comparable to the U.S. North Korea, on the other hand, remains impoverished, oppressed, hostile, and isolated, though nuclear-armed.

It’s worth remembering that the Korean War officially never ended; an armistice was signed, but not a formal declaration ending the war. The ironically-named Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries remains the most heavily fortified in the world. Tensions continue to flare between the countries, most recently over the sinking of a South Korean ship by a North Korean submarine. Idealists dream of someday reunifying the countries, but unfortunately the prospects aren’t good, at least not in our lifetimes.

Article: Divided Koreas commemorate start of Korean War - Yahoo News

This is pretty cool:

Twenty-first century laser technology has opened a window into the early days of the Catholic Church, guiding researchers through the dank, musty catacombs beneath Rome to a startling find: the first known icons of the apostles Peter and Paul.

Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighborhood.

Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and saved her diary, has died at 100. Gies and her husband Bep, along with a few others, hid Anne Frank, her family, and four others in a secret annex, supplying them with food, books, and news from the outside. Like most heroes, she was modest, saying she didn’t wish to be a hero and giving the credit to others. But at a pivotal time she made the decision to do the right thing, risking everything. May her deeds never be forgotten.

It’s a special Christmas edition of Podcast Appalachia, featuring Christmas memories and stories from the Appalachian region! You can listen here.

The latest episode of Podcast Appalachia is now available. In this episode, we examine the colorful history and culture of moonshine, the most famous ’spirit’ of Appalachia. You can listen here or read a transcript here.

Longtime East Tennessee residents probably remember the controversial Tellico Dam, built by the TVA during the 1970s as a means of bringing economic development to Loudon County and the Tennessee Valley. This was the first–and only–TVA dam built for this reason; those previously constructed were for flood control.

The Tellico Dam is probably best remembered today, and least outside the Tennessee Valley, as being nearly torpedoed by the infamous snail darter, a small fish whose habitat was said to be threatened by construction. The snail darter would delay construction for several years, and became a symbol of dogmatic environmentalists standing in the way of progress.

Small fish weren’t the only obstacles to construction, however. Native Americans argued that the land flooded held religious significance, and environmental groups questioned the ethics of radically changing the Little Tennessee River, especially for the sole purpose of possible economic development. They too fought the good fight, but only succeeded in delaying the inevitable. The Native Americans fought the White man and lost, a recurrent theme of American history.

Then there were the property owners themselves, whose land was slated to be flooded. Since politicians rarely ever care much about the little guys who get in the way of their master plans, these people were kindly informed they would have to leave, and generously offered money for their troubles. This was done under the guise of eminent domain, and surely would have made supporters of the Kelo vs. New London decision proud.

Some of the property owners sold willingly; others held out to the bitter end. The most famous holdout was Nellie McCall, an elderly woman who had lived in the area her whole life, and who became a powerful symbol for the holdouts. She refused to sell out and refused to budge, but was eventually evicted by federal marshals.

Though the critics lost that battle, they may have eventually won the war: prior to the controversy, few questioned the construction of new dams, seeing them as progress, a sign of technological advancement and an enlightened society. Those who stood up to the TVA helped change this perception (it’s hard to win a PR battle while forcibly removing poor, elderly women from their homes), and no TVA dams have been built in the three decades since.

WBIR notes that it was been 30 years since the Tellico Dam opened its gates on the Little Tennessee River, and features some remarks from a man who initially opposed its construction and lost some property as a result, but has since come around to accept the dam as an advantage for the region. Perhaps he’s right, but I’m not so sure.

After a sixteen month hiatus, Podcast Appalachia is back! In this episode, I examine the history of the “lost” State of Franklin. You can listen here or read a transcript here.

This week, Congress took up a non-binding resolution honoring the birthday of Confucius. It’s nice to see Congress putting their time into such vital and pressing matters.

The website that allowed you to build your first website has expired:

Time is up for Yahoo Inc.’s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline.

GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.

At the turn of the century, GeoCities was nearly ubiquitous. Fathers created websites about their families; kids created sites about Pokemon; teenage girls created sites about the Backstreet Boys. Practically every facet of culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible.

All of those documents are about to disappear.

A sad day for us who remember the days of dial up Internet. The website that would someday become this blog was hosted at Geocities in the early 2000s. In those days it seemed so cool and so modern to have a website, annoying pop up ads not withstanding. Sometimes I stumble on one of those sites and am reminded of what the Internet was like a decade ago. Amatuerish, yes, but real. Now the kids have Facebook and MySpace for such vanities, but Geocities remained as a monument to those who came before. It’s a shame Yahoo is taking them all down.

Well, good:

A Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin’s grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people to their deaths.

A judge at a Moscow district court rejected Yevgeny Dzhugashvili’s claim that Novaya Gazeta damaged Stalin’s honor and dignity in an April article that referred to him as a “bloodthirsty cannibal.”

I don’t think it’s possible to damage Stalin’s “honor” or “dignity.”

Jonah Goldberg makes a convincing case for expanding Congress:

Except for a brief effort to accommodate Alaska and Hawaii, the size of the House has been frozen at 435 members since 1911. A 1929 law, driven in part by a desire to keep immigrants underrepresented, has kept it that way.

But there’s nothing sacred about the 435 number. In fact, the Founders would be aghast at the idea that the “peoples’ house” is filled with pols speaking for hundreds of thousands of citizens.

I’m not one who believes more democracy is the answer to all our problems, but the House is supposed to be the “People’s House,” the most democratic chamber of government. At one time, representing 30,000 people was considered excessive; today districts can have nearly a million people. With districts that large, it’s hard not to wonder how well Americans are being represented.

Incheon is a port city located about thirty miles west of Seoul near the border with North Korea. With a population of 2.5 million, Incheon would probably be a little known city outside of Korea if not for the Battle of Incheon, where General Douglas MacArthur made his famous landing in September, 1950. Considered quite the gamble at the time (MacArthur insisted on this approach, going against the advice of several advisers), the famous landing ultimately turned the tide of the Korean War and allowed for South Korea to be liberated.
On March 14, 2009, I visited Incheon.

The way to Incheon’s Freedom Park.

Overlooking Incheon.

The statue of MacArthur in Freedom Park.

Chinatown.

The entrance to Incheon Landing Operation Memorial Hall and Museum.

As everyone knows, eight years have passed since the event that changed the world. Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? And yet, the world has changed so much since then that it’s hard to believe that only eight years have passed.

Yet here were are, eight years later, looking back on that event and how it changed the world. Certainly it changed many of us as individuals. I was a 20 year old student at Cumberland University on that Tuesday morning, just starting to stir in my dorm room. I woke up and flipped on the TV, then slipped back into a semi-asleep state when I heard, half awake, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t think much of it; I mean, it was tragic and all, but it was probably an accident, right?

Wrong. When I heard that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, like everyone else, I knew it was no accident. The point was reinforced when a third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and another crashed in Shanksville, PA. We were at war. There was no turning back.

I didn’t see the towers fall. I was preparing for class when the first collapsed, and returned to the TV to see one of the towers was gone. ‘Surely it didn’t fall,’ I thought. I was informed of the next collapse from a student who ran into my classroom with the news. An older student sitting next to me said ‘Get ready to enlist; we’re at war.’

Well, that didn’t happen, but September 11, 2001 remains the most surreal day I’ve ever lived through. I knew that someday my children and grandchildren would ask about it. This would be the defining moment of my generation (born in 1981, I’m either the very last of Generation X or the very first of Generation Y, depending on whose timeline you use).

9/11 changed me in some ways, the most obvious of which being my interest in politics. I had a passing interest in current events prior to that day, but afterwards I became obsessive, spending several hours a day watching the news. After I transferred to UT I got involved in the College Republicans and became a columnist for the Daily Beacon. Later, I even changed my major to political science, and went on to earn a Master’s degree in that subject. And, of course, I’ve been maintaining this blog for almost six years. If not for 9/11, I doubt any of this would happen.

Well, my politics have cooled a bit since that day, mostly due to disillusionment about the presidency of George W. Bush and the conservative movement in general. But politics still fascinate me, and I still know what I believe, even if politicians rarely ever institute it. I know there are millions of others who have a 9/11 story similar to my own.

A very interesting find has been made on the University of Tennessee campus. A brief quote here, but definitely read the whole article:

Military maps from almost 150 years ago placed confederate artillery during the Battle of Fort Sanders at the location of the planned village near the corner of Kingston Pike and Neyland Drive. Before constructing the gated all-sorority neighborhood, the school asked the archaeology department to dig into the issue.”The maps showed trenches here and artillery that fired on Fort Sanders,” said UT archaeologist Michael Angst. “We started digging perpendicular to the trenches in April and figured we would intersect them if they existed.”

Researchers discovered two trenches spanning a total of approximately 275 feet along with two battery positions. Nearly 150 years later, the red subsoil still has impressions from the wheels of the large cannons.

“There are two gun emplacements where there would have been a cannon or small howitzer. You can actually see the wheel ruts where they sat down in here,” said Angst. “We also found drainage trenches and several fireplaces dug in along the trench.”

“The fireplaces were built by the men to keep warm. It was cold on November 29th, 1863. You can start to breathe some real humanness into this whole thing,” said Chapman.

I’m glad UT decided to investigate this site, and I’m glad the artifacts will be preserved in a museum. It’s a shame the entire site isn’t being preserved, instead of being used to built a village for sororities to insult each other and spread STDs.

Donghwasa Temple is a Buddhist temple located near Daegu, South Korea. It is very ancient; a temple has existed on the site since 493 AD. It remains one of the most spectacular temples in Korea.

These photos were taken on February 28, 2009.

Tiananmen Square, probably China’s second most well-known landmark following the Great Wall, has a long history of destruction and resurrection. Originally know as Chengtianmen, the square was first built in 1420 as a reconstruction of the imperial building at Nanjing, also called Chengtianmen. Lighting destroyed the gate in 1457. In 1465 the gate was rebuilt. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was again destroyed, this time by rebels. The gate was once again rebuilt in 1645, and given its current name. The gate was once again reconstructed in 1969-1970.

In the West, Tiananmen Square is most well known for the infamous massacre which occurred there in 1989.
The following photos were taken on January 26, 2009.

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which separates the Forbidden City from Tiananmen Square.

On January 26, 2009 I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing, China. The Forbidden City, so called because it was forbidden to common people, was built between 1406 and 1420 and served as imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1912). It houses 980 surviving buildings and covers 7,800,000 square feet.